Java&OpenOffice.org – Simon Phipps (part I)

On tuesday Mr Phipps was in Milano to join the Open Source Business Accademy. In the morning I attended his speech about Sun approach to free software and I posed him a question about Sun’s strategy for appropriating returns from the commons.

“As a matter of fact Sun is the firm with the best knowledge about all the projects disclosed to the Open Source community. Is the double-licensing scheme seen for OpenOffice.org the strategy or you have different plans?”

Simon answered that

the double licensing StarOffice/OpenOffice.org didn’t work. The next year Sun will be delivering value added services based on open source products, making software profitable for the very first time.

(to be continued)